Introduction

AMD's Radeon RX480 Series was released in late June and is the company's first graphics card based on its new "Polaris" GPU architecture, and its first chip built on the 14 nanometer FinFET process. It is also the first AMD GPU made at GlobalFoundries, which is a deviation from the year-long relationship with TSMC.

The silicon driving the RX 480, which is based on "Polaris," is codenamed "Ellesmere" and is externally referred to by AMD as "Polaris 10." Polaris 10 on the Radeon RX 480 comes with 2304 shaders enabled, 144 texture units and 32 ROPS that are connected to a 256-bit wide memory bus with 8 GB of GDDR5 memory.

In this review, we are taking a look at the MSI RX 480 Gaming X, a custom-design Radeon RX 480. We've tested many MSI Gaming cards in the past and nearly all of them impressed with good temperatures and low noise levels. Let's hope MSI can pull it off on the RX 480 as well, a card where many AIBs have failed to produce good board designs that can compete with NVIDIA's GTX 1060 offerings.

MSI has told us pricing of their RX 480 Gaming X to be $259-$269, so we'll be using $265 throughout this review.